Cyclone Amphan slams into India, loses some intensity

Police officers carry a disabled man to a safer place following his evacuation from a slum area before Cyclone Amphan makes its landfall, in Kolkata, India, on May 20. REUTERS

A powerful cyclone barrelled into eastern India on Wednesday with heavy rain, wind and waves as millions of people were evacuated from there and Bangladesh in an operation complicated by the campaign against the novel coronavirus.

Cyclone Amphan had begun moving inland, the India Meteorological Department said in a bulletin at 3 p.m. (0930 GMT), after brewing for days in the Bay of Bengal to become one of the strongest storms to hit the region in about a decade, Reuters reports.

Officials in India's Odisha and West Bengal states said powerful winds had torn off roofs, uprooted trees and bent electricity poles, hitting power supplies in some areas.

India said the landfall process is expected to continue for about four hours, news broadcaster NDTV reports.

The storm lost some of its intensity and was downgraded from a super cyclone to an "extremely severe cyclonic storm" on Tuesday as it advanced towards the Indian coast, according to the Indian Met Office.

In Bangladesh, State Minister for Disaster Management Enamur Rahman said about 2.4 million people in the most vulnerable districts had been shifted to more than 15,000 storm shelters.

"It has been challenging to evacuate people while maintaining distancing. We have doubled the number of the cyclone centres to ensure safe distancing and hygiene," Rahman said.

In India, the wind speed could be from 110-120 kmh when it reaches Howrah, Kolkata and Hoogli, a senior IMD official told reporters. The authorities have scrambled to evacuate people from low-lying areas in Amphan's projected trail of destruction. But their task is complicated by the need to follow precautions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, with infection numbers still soaring in both countries and hospitals struggling to cope, NDTV reports.

The Met Office warned of possible flying objects, “extensive” damage to communications and power lines and trees being ripped out of the ground by the wind. Kolkata was battered by heavy rain and the muddy Hooghly River was rising under dark skies, while large waves were pounding the shore in the coastal area of Digha.

Bangladeshi officials also said they had moved hundreds of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, living on a flood-prone island in the Bay of Bengal, to storm shelters.

Standing crops could be damaged and large tracts of fertile land washed away, officials said. Farmers were being helped to move produce and hundreds of thousands of farm animals to higher ground.

"Fortunately, the harvesting of the rice crop has almost been completed. Still it could leave a trail of destruction," Mizanur Rahman Khan, a senior official in the Bangladesh agriculture ministry, said of the storm.

An Indian home ministry official said authorities in West Bengal and Odisha had struggled to house thousands of evacuees as shelters were being used as coronavirus quarantine centres.

Extra shelters were being prepared in markets and government buildings with allowances made for social distancing, while masks were being distributed to villagers.

Police in West Bengal said some people were unwilling to go to the shelters because they were afraid of being infected by the coronavirus and many were refusing to leave their livestock.

"We have literally had to force people out of their homes, make them wear masks and put them in government buildings," said a senior police official in West Bengal's capital, Kolkata.

Monoranjan, a resident of Choto Mollakhali island in the Sunderbans area of the Ganges river delta, which is expected to bear the brunt of the storm, said the storm could destroy rice stocks.